workers

FOR THE FORMATION OF A NEW WORLD PARTY OF SOCIALIST REVOLUTION - A FIFTH INTERNATIONAL

power

Why not vote SNP?

P4-5

Workers answer to the crisis

P6-7

The left and labour movement

P8-9

Syriza and Podemos

P9-10

MONTHLY REVIEW OF THE WORKERS POWER GROUP

ISSUE 383 APRIL 2015 1 / 2

Kick out the Tories

Vote for socialist candidates where possible and Labour everywhere else

The Greens and Nationalists are no alternative for building a struggle to stop austerity after the election. A big vote for Left Unity and
TUSC can help lay the foundation for a new working class party fighting for a socialist solution to the crisis

JEREMY DEWAR

he importance of the 2015 general

have caused any of our problems; the capitalist

election is not just that it will be close-

We need a
Labour majority
government that
is forced to break
with all austerity
by a massive
working class
mobilisation in
defence of jobs,
living conditions
and public
services

run and that new or previously fringe

parties are gaining ground. In fact the

fracturing of support for all three main capitalist

parties reflects something far more fundamental.

Britain is at a crossroads. We can either travel

further down the road we have been on for the past

five years or more more privatisation, poverty

wages and crumbling services or the working

class can stand up and say, enough is enough!

Decently paid jobs have been destroyed and

replaced by zero-hours contracts and part-time,

minimum wage jobs. Real wages, after inflation

is taken into account, have fallen for seven

years in a row, and are now at 6.9 per cent

below their 2007 value, the longest squeeze on

wages since 1855.

National Health Service waiting lists have

grown longer, Accident & Emergency departments

are overflowing thanks to cuts elsewhere, and pri-

vate profiteers have gobbled up over 7 billion

of the NHS budget. Two-thirds of our hospitals
are in deficit, and therefore targets for closure.
Over 3,000 of our state schools are effectively

in private hands, via the academies and free

schools programmes, local colleges are in crisis

and tuition fees for university students are 9,000

per year. Young people face the biggest cuts to

benefits, the worst and most insecure jobs and the

highest unemployment rate: a lost generation.

Racism is on the rise, with anti-immigrant party

Ukip gaining a high profile as the voice of scape-

goating foreigners for the low wages, job cuts and

system has. We need to unite the whole working

class in a fight against the real enemy and for the

real solution: socialism.

And now Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond

and Prime Minister David Cameron are beating

the war drums again, this time against Russia. The

Coalition (TUSC).

Put Labour to the test

Yes, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls are threatening a

programme of austerity-lite. But Labour remains

the party of the trade unions, and most workers

still see it as their party, whereas the Tories, as

Middle East is in flames again, a continuing result

can be seen by their endorsement by 103 major

and Afghanistan. Nato, egged on by Cameron, is

italist through and through. It would be a victory

of the UK and USAs wars of occupation in Iraq

provocatively tooling up the countries bordering

Russia for a new Cold War that could turn hot

with disastrous consequences for us all.

None of this has achieved the Coalitions stated

aim: to cut the debt, eliminate the deficit and

business leaders in the Daily Telegraph, are cap-

for the working class to eject the bosses preferred

party from government.

Because of Labours trade union links and its

base in working class communities, it is possible

for us to push Labour further to the left than their

achieve a stable recovery. On the contrary, the

leaders would like to go. But that requires a strong

to 1.56 trillion, and the budget deficit remains

into office after the polls close. In the process, we

recovery is stalled with high levels of personal

from top to bottom.

national debt has nearly doubled from 760 billion

high at 90 billion, due to low tax revenues. The

debt, low productivity due to a lack of new investment and serious problems in global markets.

Austerity hasnt worked. Yet all three main par-

ties, including Labour, pledge to continue down

movement of resistance to the cuts, whoever gets

will have to revolutionise the labour movement

But we can do it. Previous generations certainly

did in the 1880s, the 1940s and the 1970s. We

can and must follow their footsteps.

Stop and reverse all the cuts!

housing shortages caused by the economic crisis.

that road. Whats the alternative?

End privatisation and invest in public services

tinue to discriminate against black and Asian peo-

tion would be a majority Labour government, with

Tax the rich and nationalise the banks and big

Employers, the police and even our schools con-

ple.

Yet neither immigrants nor ethnic minorities

The best result for the working class in this elec-

a strong showing for socialist candidates from

Left Unity and the Trade Unionist and Socialist

for all!

business, placing them under working class

control!

2 APRIL 2015 Workers Power

no. 383

What we
fight for

Workers Power is a revolutionary communist

organisation whose politics are founded on
the following principles
CAPITALISM is an anarchic and crisis-ridden economic system based on production
for profit. We are for the expropriation of the
capitalist class and the abolition of capitalism.
We are for its replacement by socialist production planned to satisfy human need. Only
the socialist revolution and the smashing of
the capitalist state can achieve this goal. Only
the working class, led by a revolutionary vanguard party and organised into workers
councils and workers militias can lead such
a revolution to victory and establish the rule of
the working class in society. There is no
peaceful, parliamentary road to socialism.
THE LABOUR PARTY is not a socialist
party. It is a bourgeois workers party procapitalist in its politics and practice, but based
on the working class via the trade unions and
supported by the mass of workers at the
polls. We are for the creation of a genuine
workers party, based on a programme for the
overthrow of capitalism and the implementation of socialism and workers power.
THE TRADE UNIONS must be transformed by a rank and file movement to put
control of the unions into the hands of the
members. All officials must be regularly
elected and subject to instant recall; they
must earn the average wage of the members
they represent. We are for the building of fighting organisations of the working class factory committees, industrial unions, councils of
action and workers defence organisations.

ISSUE 16 SPRING 14/15 OUT NOW

OCTOBER 1917 The Russian revolution established a workers state. But Stalin destroyed workers democracy and set about
the reactionary and utopian project of building
socialism in one country. In the USSR and
the other degenerate workers states that
were established from above, capitalism was
destroyed but the bureaucracy excluded the
working class from power, blocking the road
to democratic planning and socialism. The
parasitic bureaucratic caste led these states
to crisis and destruction. Stalinism has consistently betrayed the working class. The Stal-

inist Communist Parties strategy of alliances

with the capitalists (popular fronts) and their
stages theory of revolution have inflicted terrible defeats on the working class worldwide.
These parties are reformist and offer no perspective for workers revolution.
SOCIAL OPPRESSION is an integral feature of capitalism, which systematically oppresses people on the basis of race, age,
gender and sexual orientation. We are for the
liberation of women and for the building of a
working class womens movement, not an
all-class autonomous movement. We are
for the liberation of all the oppressed. We fight
racism and fascism. We oppose all immigration controls. We fight for labour movement
support for black self-defence against racist
and state attacks. We are for no platform for
fascists and for driving them out of the
unions.
IMPERIALISM is a world system, which
oppresses nations and prevents economic
development in the vast majority of third world
countries. We support the struggles of the
oppressed nationalities or countries against
imperialism. Against the politics of the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois nationalists we fight
for permanent revolution working class
leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle
under the banner of socialism and internationalism. In conflicts between imperialist and
semi-colonial countries, we are for the victory
of those oppressed and exploited by imperialism. We are for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of British troops from
Ireland and all other countries. We fight imperialist war, not with pacifist pleas, but with militant class struggle methods, including the
forcible disarmament of our own bosses.
FIFTH INTERNATIONAL We stand in the
tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky
and the revolutionary policies of the first four
congresses of the Third International. Workers
Power is the British Section of the League for
the Fifth International. The L5I is pledged to
refound a revolutionary communist International and build a new world party of socialist
revolution. If you are a class-conscious fighter
against capitalism, if you are an internationalist
join us!

Cuts put women

on rations
Austerity is reversing the limited gains of
working class women
REBECCA ANDERSON

hancellor George Osborne crowed

in his 2015 budget speech that the
employment rate was at 73 per
cent, an all-time high. Those with
friends and family struggling to find work
will be surprised by this statistic, but the Tories have been very effective at kicking people off benefits.
Job Centre sanctions are forcing unemployed people to take any kind of work offered to them, no matter how few hours are
available, what the salary is or how rubbish
the conditions. Faced with the prospect of
slaving away for free in various dead-end
workfare schemes, some are even declaring
themselves self-employed: working long
hours while paying themselves less than the
minimum wage.
Green party leader Natalie Bennett pointed
out in the ITV leaders debate that 80 per cent
of self-employed people are living in poverty.
Yet women are more likely to be self-employed than men. They are also more likely
to work in lower paid and part-time jobs.
It is the recession that has forced women to
take worse jobs. Women have been forced to
trade relatively well-paid, full-time, permanent
posts in the public sector (where women form
a majority) for low-waged, part-time, temporary or zero-hours contracts in the private sector. Unsurprisingly the pay gap between men
and women has widened after years of narrowing. It now stands at 15.7 per cent.
Tory austerity is also turning back the
clock on the gains that women have made in
terms of gaining more independence through
access to Child Benefit and Child Tax Credit
and all the social advances that are linked
to that financial independence.
The Independent Inquiry into Women and
Job Seekers Allowance says: 85 per cent of
the revenue saved through changes to the tax
and benefit system since 2010 has come from
women (22 billion), and 15 per cent from
men (4 billion).
The inquiry also points out that those with
caring responsibilities are more likely to be

workers power

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sanctioned by Job Centres, and that people who

lose their Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) are also
liable to lose access to free school meals, free
prescriptions and Healthy Start milk.
This impoverishes children as well as their
mothers, and inevitably makes it harder for
women to leave unhappy relationships. The
Womens Budget Group reports that lone parents have lost 15.1 per cent of their disposable income and 92 per cent of lone parents
are women. The safety net of benefits that the
Tories are eroding has for decades provided
women with an alternative to remaining in
abusive relationships. Now this safety-net is
being shredded.
To compound this problem, the Tories have

85 per cent of the

revenue saved
through changes to
the tax and benefit
system since 2010
has come from
women (22 billion),
and 15 per cent from
men (4 billion)

systematically withdrawn funding to womens

refuges and other services providing support
to victims of domestic and sexual abuse.
As the General Election looms, we should
all be aware of how devastating the cuts have
been for women and how much worse the situation could get. The Institute for Fiscal
Studies has estimated that there will be a further 50 billion of spending cuts if the Tories
win the election.
Whoever wins in May, it wont be working
class women.
All the major parties are committed to cuts;
its just a question of how much and how fast.
If we are to defend our public services and
welfare state, win more secure employment
and force the government to fund women's
refuges then we need to fight.
We need to be organised in trade unions,
political parties and anti-austerity campaigns;
it almost goes without saying that women are
often the majority in these working class organisations (though rarely in the leadership).
But the burden of austerity on women also
means that we need to organise as women.
A working class womens movement that
exposes all the attacks on womens financial
and social independence, that launches campaigns in defence of women, and fights for
womens liberation could win significant victories against whatever government takes
power next month.

Workers Power APRIL 2015 3

The fight of our lives

editorial

We cant afford another Tory government and we cant rely on Labour to defend us
JEREMY DEWAR

his election comes at a crucial time. A

quick glance at some facts and figures
reveals why. We have just lived
through the longest and deepest recession in history. Output did not reach the pre-recession peak of 2007 until 2014. Looking south
to Europe, east and west to China and the USA,
youd say were not out of the woods yet.
Wages have collapsed: the most sustained
squeeze on pay since 1855, according to the Office for Budgetary Responsibility.
There were 203 academy schools in May
2010. Today there are 4,548 academies and free
schools: 21.6 per cent of the total and the majority of all secondaries.
Seven per cent of the NHS budget now goes
to profit-making contractors. Now this is set to
explode. Since April 2013, a third of all contracts have gone to private providers, who have
won 60 per cent of their bids against the NHS.
Britain has 2 million too few housing units.
Last year just 141,000 houses were built in the
UK, 60 per cent of pre-crisis levels and way
below the 1969-70 peak of 378,000.
As a result 9 million people are now paying
astronomical rents to private landlords, 5 million are waiting on housing lists and house
prices are a record seven times the average annual wage.
The impact on those at the bottom of society
has been the hardest. Women have suffered
four-fifths of the cuts, black and Asian people
and migrants confront mounting racism and discrimination, young people are denied benefits,
a minimum wage and all but the meanest of
jobs; the sick, the elderly and the vulnerable
have had benefits slashed.

Labours dilemma
If Labour is elected and forms the next government, it is promising some respite.
It says it will raise the minimum wage to 8
an hour it currently stands at 6.50 for over21s.
It promises to repeal the Health and Social

Government figures
show we have lived
through the most
sustained squeeze on
pay since 1855
Care Act and recruit 20,000 more nurses, 8,000
more GPs, 3,000 more midwives and 5,000
new care workers. Shadow health secretary
Andy Burnham wants to make the NHS the
preferred bidder for all contracts and to spend
2.5 billion a year more on healthcare.
Labour will protect the education budget and
freeze the free schools programme. Along with
more money to fund apprenticeships, it will cut
university tuition fees from 9,000 to 6,000 a
year.
The party pledges to build 200,000 new
homes a year by 2020, and tax houses worth
more than 2 million.
These are the reasons why millions of working class voters will vote Labour. The problem
is Labour is also committed to the Tories eyewatering threat to cut spending by 5 per cent a
year for the next two years, and to close the
budget deficit by 2020.

It cannot do both.
In fact it points to Labours historic dilemma:
a party committed to the upkeep of the capitalist
system, which means its reforms are dependent
on keeping profits high. But it also rests on the
trade unions for funding, its core working class
support at the polls, and working class ideals of
equality and fairness even if it has ditched its
socialist goal.
We know from previous Labour governments
that the bankers and the bosses, the City of London and the CBI will use all their powers to

House prices are now

seven times the
average annual
wage - the highest on
record
force Labour to water down or abandon its
spending commitments, while carrying through
every one of its cuts.
If the capitalists forced an anti-austerity party
like Syriza in Greece to climb down over its
commitments to the poor, then imagine how
easily they may be able to pressure Labour into
more austerity, not less.
Thats why Workers Power wants to put
Labour in office, where we can mobilise to
force Labour not only to honour its pledges, but
also to go much further: to close the internal
NHS market, to build a million council houses,
to bring the academies, free schools, grammar
and fee-paying schools under local authority
ownership and control, to legislate for a minimum wage of 10 an hour and lift the pay
freeze, and to tax the rich and the corporations
to the hilt.
To do this, we will have to build a mass
movement that can mobilise at the sharp end of
the austerity onslaught.
Social housing tenants will need to stop evictions and social cleansing, and join with the
millions stuck in private rented accommodation
to demand rent controls, secure contracts and
more council units.
Local communities will have to rally together
with health and education workers to protect
hospitals and schools from closure, privatisation or budget cuts.
We will need a wave of coordinated all-out
strikes to restore our spending power to pre-cri-

sis levels, to prevent the destruction of decent

jobs and to stop and reverse privatisation. And
if this means breaking the anti-union laws, we
should do so and demand Labour rescinds
them.
Not a penny more to the banks, which are as
corrupt as sin and caused the crisis in the first
place.
Of course this will raise the question of the
trade unions blind loyalty to a Labour Party in
conflict with their members interests. While
the right wing will call for a compromise on the
Blairites terms also known as surrender we
should demand that the unions break from
Labour and put their political funds towards
constructing a new mass party of the working
class.

or more Tory cuts

Putting Labour to this test would be the best
outcome. Because the alternative an outright
Tory government or a Conservative-led coalition would be far, far worse.
David Cameron, George Osborne and co.
wont even say where their cuts are going to
fall. Why? Because they know that if they told
the truth their vote would crumble.
After all, thats what happened last time,
when they along with the Lib-Dems
whipped out a completely new manifesto after
the election as the basis for the coalition.
What we do know however is that there will
be even more savage cuts to benefits and pensions, more zero-hours, part-time and minimum
wage jobs, less social housing and higher house
prices and private sector rents. The NHS and
state education will be starved of funds, fragmented, privatised and exposed to the profitmaking imperatives of the market.
Then we really will be in for the fight of our
lives. All the warnings about needing to mobilise a mass movement of resistance under a
Labour administration would apply doubly so
under the Tories.

Revolutionise the movement

Either way, we cannot simply go along with
business as usual. It will not be enough to hold
big demos every couple of years, to mount the
occasional one-day strike only to call off the action at the first whiff of talks or to rely on a political party that condemns strikes and only
offers to make more humane cuts with a
slower tempo and a heavy heart.
Our current trade union leaders are not fit for

workers power
MARXIST MONTHLY REVIEW

Editor
Jeremy Dewar
Deputy Editor
KD Tait
Editorial
Richard Brenner, Marcus Halaby, Joy
Macready, Dave Stockton
Letters
BCM Box 7750
WC1N 3XX

Contact
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Email: contact@workerspower.co.uk
Circulation and subscription
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Website www.workerspower.co.uk
Workers Power Britain 2015
Printed by Newsquest

purpose. We need to organise all the best trade

unionists into a movement to hold them to account, to deliver decisive action from below
when necessary, and to replace them with rank
and file class fighters.
The various far left socialist groups took the
initiative after 2010 in setting up coordinations
of struggle: the Coalition of Resistance, the
Peoples Assembly, the National Shop Stewards
Network, Unite the Resistance. There was little
if any coordination as a result.
All these campaigns were undemocratically
controlled from behind the scenes by the Communist Party of Britain, the Socialist Party, the
SWP or smaller groups. None of them had any
real presence on the ground, in our towns and
cities. And none of them united in action. Union
leaders came along to speak at big halls and rallies and walked away scot-free, with no de-

Parliament is a talking
shop - we need to rely
on mobilising our own
collective strength to
defend our services
mands effectively placed on them.
This time, we should force the creation of
real councils of action at local, regional and national levels. Delegates from workplaces, housing estates, schools and colleges, along with the
union branches and campaigning organisations,
should gather to discuss, decide on and take action. This is the only way we will loosen the bureaucrats grip, so we can fight with both hands.
Last but not least, we will have to pose the
question of what kind of party we need. The
candidates for the Trade Unionist and Socialist
Coalition and Left Unity already call for a new
party. Thats why we support them.
But others, still committed to Labour, should
also be drawn into the debate. However, we
should reserve no leading positions for them,
nor privileges for MPs and councillors.
Our aim of course should be to take the
power, but our focus in the first instance should
be on organising resistance. A new workers
party should not make the winning of elections
the be all and end all of its programme; elections are a means to an end.
We believe an anti-austerity party needs to be
anticapitalist as well, since it is the logic of capitalism that is driving austerity forwards. Only
by taking over the banks and mega-corporations
and confiscating their assets will we be able to
cancel the debt and start planning to rebuild our
cities and stop the destruction of the environment.
By basing ourselves on the democratic bodies that have been built up to conduct the struggle, we can fight for a real workers government
that can defy the markets.
Parliament, in the end, is just a talking shop.
Real working class power has to rest on millions, ready for action arms in hand if necessary when the bosses use the police, the courts
and special forces to deny the majority their
will.
Thats what we fight for in this election and
the months and years to come. And thats why,
if you agree with us, you should join Workers
Power.

4 APRIL 2015 Workers Power

election

Why vote Labour?

Millions of workers know a vote for their party will make a tangible difference

ong before the delayed publication of

its election manifesto, the Labour Party
leadership made very clear what their
real priorities in government would be.
In a glossy pamphlet called A Better Plan for
Business they explained how a whole range of
policies would be used to protect profits and reduce costs for employers.
On taxation they would maintain the most
competitive Corporation Tax rate in the G7, and
cut, then freeze, business rates for more than 1.5
million small businesses.
Less taxation will inevitably put even more
pressure on public spending and on this Ed Balls
and company promised to cap child benefit rises
for two years and social security spending in
each spending review, in other words, every year.
Moreover, they will ensure that, outside a few
protected areas, departmental spending would
continue to fall until we balance the books.
This means continuing with the Tory cuts across
most of the public sector.
The pamphlet also promised that the manifesto would contain no proposals for any new
spending paid for by additional borrowing and
proudly pointed out that the Institute for Fiscal
Studies had identified Labour as the most cautious of the three main Parties, and the only one
that has not announced an overall net giveaway.
On a broader scale, the pamphlet welcomed
the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), describing it as a trade agreement
between the US and the EU, that has the potential to boost trade and growth, secure and create
jobs, and extend choice for consumers.
In reality, TTIP is intended to remove regulatory barriers to international trade, meaning
the removal of, for example, trade union rights,
health and safety legislation and environmental
protection laws and the opening of all areas of
public provision of services to competitive tendering.
In a further bid to subsidise firms with public
money and assets, there is a proposal to introduce
Technical Degrees at universities, which will
give firms real influence over the curriculum to
ensure they can meet their specialist skills gaps.
The message could not be clearer: Labour's
priority will be to use both legislation and public
assets to boost private profits.
Why, then, does this paper call for a vote for
Labour?
There are, essentially, two reasons, one short
term the other long term, and they are both related to the character of the Labour Party. Any
party that has played a central role in society for
any length of time must reflect and express the
political ideas and interests of a social class, or
section of a class.
Labour was founded, over a century ago, by
workers' organisations, primarily the trades
unions or, to be more precise, the trade union
leaders. That fact sets it apart from other parties,
even if there are similarities of policy.
It is why, despite Labour's promises to big
business, 103 prominent business leaders wrote
an open letter to the Daily Telegraph in which
they praised the Tory policies of the present government and warned that any change in course
will threaten jobs and deter investment. This
would send a negative message about Britain and
put the recovery at risk.
What these business interests recognise is that,
while Miliband and Balls may make policy, they
do not make it in circumstances of their own

PETER MAIN
choosing. Because of the historic link to the
trades unions and, through them, to the wider
working class, Labour in office is subject to very
real pressures that mean there are also important
differences of policy.
This is why polls repeatedly show that Labour
is more trusted to maintain the NHS. People
remember that, even under Blair, billions were
transferred to the NHS to overcome the budgetary crisis inherited from the Tories in 1997.
Moreover, Labour's roots in the working class
could also obstruct, delay or alter the implementation of its pro-business policies. In the short
term, that could be an advantage to the working
class, allowing it, for example, to organise to defend gains made in the past or to force concessions either from government or from
employers. However, for the potential to be
turned into reality requires a willingness to fight
a Labour government and that is by no means
guaranteed.
What is guaranteed is that, when the chips are
down, Labour will be prepared to force through
what the bosses want, even at the cost of attacking its own supporters. This was very clearly the
case in the Blair and Brown governments,
which not only enthusiastically collaborated with
the US in Middle Eastern wars but also introduced student fees, initiated the internal market
in the NHS, opened the way to academies in
compulsory education and refused to repeal the
anti-union laws.
It is obvious that the experience of those governments has seriously eroded Labour's working
class base, most spectacularly in Scotland but, to
one degree or another, practically everywhere.
This brings us to the second, longer-term, reason
for voting Labour, even despite that experience.
First of all, disillusion with Labour is far from
complete, probably even in Scotland, certainly
elsewhere, and, as history has shown, if Labour
remains out of office it could recover at least
some of its lost support. With Labour back in
government, the reality of its policies will erode
working class support further.
More importantly, ultimately, disillusion with
the Labour Party is not the same as disillusion
with Labourism, or reformism in general. If
the decline, or collapse, of the Labour Party were
only to result in the formation of a new party
with a leadership genuinely committed to trying
to reform capitalism, a kind of Labour Party
Mark Two, that would not resolve the problem.
For Marxists, the only strategy for the overthrow of capitalism is one in which the working
class, a majority of the population in any developed capitalist society, organises itself to take
power into its own hands in the form of democratically elected workers' councils.
Building a party committed to that strategy
means fighting against the reformist strategy and
that is better done with a Labour Party in government than with the same party in the role of
opposition, particularly in the context of an unresolved economic crisis such as we have now.
The combination of short term considerations,
Labour having to appeal to its working class
base, being distrusted by the bosses and at least
hampered in its implementation of anti-working
class policies, and the longer term considerations
of leading the working class to break with reformism as a whole, is why we call for a vote for
Labour in the great majority of constituencies
where there is no socialist candidate or no representative of ongoing working class struggle.

Why cant I vote

Promises of left wing reforms are worthless

ll indicators point to a massive

swing from Labour to the Scottish
Nationalist Party (SNP) in the coming election. It is possible that the
SNP could go from its present 6 seats to more
than 40 and so hold the balance of power in a
hung parliament.
Because of widespread support for what
might be called traditional Labour policy, it is
often said in Scotland that it is not the voters that
have turned away from Labour, but the party that
has turned away from the voters.
But why, since there has never been a majority
for Independence in Scotland, have the voters
turned to the nationalists?
Although long derided as Tartan Tories, the
SNP realised long ago that to gain a majority in
Scotland, it was Labour's supporters it had to
win. As early as the 1960s and the debates over
nuclear disarmament, the SNP benefitted from
Labour's episodic shifts to the right as disaffected leftists joined the nationalists.
By the late 1970s, boosted by the debates on
devolution and the Labour government's rigging
of the 1979 referendum, the SNP formally identified itself as a social democratic party. However, this did not alter the party's constitution or
establish any organic links to working class organisations. Indeed, social democratic at that
time generally meant the right wing of the
Labour Party who wanted to break all links with
the unions and went on to split from Labour and
join the Liberals.
Thatcher's early imposition of the poll tax in
Scotland reinforced the SNP's argument for independence because the Tories by then were a
tiny minority of Scottish MPs. The breadth of
hostility to Westminster was such that a Campaign for a Scottish Assembly was established

and its proposal for a Scottish Parliament, but

with limited powers, was included in the Labour
manifesto for the 1997 general election that
brought Blair to power.
Scottish Labour formed the government after
the first elections to the new Scottish Parliament in May 1999, and then pursued domestic
policies that differed from those in England,
such as free university education and care of the
elderly. This was possible because the longstanding Treasury arrangement by which Scotland was allowed a higher level of public
spending was retained.

Holyrood
Despite this, the SNP, as the opposition, benefited from widespread hostility to New Labour's
policies at Westminster. In the 2007 election to
Holyrood, the SNP won the most seats and went
on to form a minority government.
This meant that after the Tory-Lib Dem Coalition came to power in 2010, but with only one
Tory MP in the whole of Scotland, the SNP could
present itself as the champion of Scotland's opposition to austerity politics. At the same time,
as a minority government in a devolved, not independent, Scotland, that opposition could never
be put to the test.
This served the SNP well in the 2011 Holyrood election in which, as well as opposing Tory
cuts, it called for a referendum on independence.
Although the electoral system had been designed to prevent any party gaining a majority
of seats, that is what the SNP did, taking 22 seats
from Labour.
In the face of this, the coalition at Westminster
agreed to the holding of last September's referendum on independence and, although the No

Workers Power APRIL 2015 5

The final frontier

election

A Tory second term will target health and welfare to complete Thatchers counter-revolution
DAVE STOCKTON

for the SNP?

without a working class party to fight for them

vote won by a reasonably comfortable margin,

it was the referendum campaign that transformed the SNP's chances. Labour's collaboration with the Tories in the No campaign,
alongside its failure to lead any fight against austerity across the whole of the UK, served to
alienate many of its remaining supporters, even
the many who opposed independence.
The momentum built up in the referendum
campaign has been deftly used by the SNP, now
under a new leader, Nicola Sturgeon. While emphasising the SNPs own policies in Scotland
government investment in 125,000 apprenticeships, 200 million to be invested in renewable
energy schemes and further investment in railway development and electrification, a promise
of no efficiency savings in the NHS in Scotland and a reminder to voters that it removed
prescription charges introduced by Labour
Sturgeon has challenged Miliband to agree to
collaborate in preventing a Tory government if
Labour and SNP have sufficient seats in the new
parliament.
That would create a situation where a minority
Labour government's survival would be dependent on SNP support, ideal conditions in which to
force concessions for Scottish policy and to obstruct austerity measures in the run up to the
2016 Scottish Parliament election.
That, however, is no reason for voting for the
SNP. For all its adoption of policies comparable
to Labour, it remains a party that has no organic
links to the working class that could hold it to
progressive policies.
That is what makes the Labour Party supportable, not its policies, which have never represented a programme against capitalism and for
socialism. Moreover, the threat of bringing down
a Labour government in Westminster in order to

extract concessions for Scotland would immediately dynamise English nationalism.

Nationalism
At no time has the SNP ever had to take full
responsibility for the implementation of its own
policies. Even as a majority government it has
been able to (and does) blame the cuts that have
been made in Scotland on Westminster and Scotland's lack of independence. Its own commitment to an anti-austerity programme, which
would bring it into direct conflict with the banks,
the major corporations and the international
guardians of capital's interests, such as the European Central Bank and the IMF, has never
been put to the test.
Whatever the shrewdness of its tactics, the
strategy of the SNP, what actually defines it, is
clearly nationalism and, in the context of the
UK, in which Scotland is not an oppressed nation, that is an entirely reactionary and backward-looking strategy.
Instead of promoting an all-UK fightback
against austerity and the capitalism that demands
it, mobilising the whole of the working class in
its own interests, the SNP has systematically
avoided that fight and led its supporters away
from united action with other workers.
Were it to achieve its goal of independence, it
would find itself governing a small country facing the same demands for austerity, reductions
in welfare spending, increased privatisation and
wage freezes as others. Nationalism would demand sacrifices in the interests of the nation
just as it does everywhere else, and Scottish
workers would find themselves in a weaker position to defend themselves on their own.

The deficit reduction programme takes

precedence over any of the other measures
in this agreement and the speed of implementation of any of the measures that have
a cost to the public finances will depend on decisions to be made in the Comprehensive Spending
Review.
This was the critical clause of the coalition
agreement in 2010. In its name any measure to alleviate the effects of the ongoing Great Recession
could be immediately trumped by the priority of
reducing the deficit.
Polly Toynbee and David Walker, in their 2015
book Camerons Coup, point out how the Tories'
real programme was initially disguised as socially progressive or caring Conservatism. The
Tories were no longer the nasty party, they were
now the Big Society party; voters could vote
blue, go green, knowing that the NHS is safe
with us.
In fact, David Cameron, George Osborne, Andrew Lansley, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael
Gove were 100 per cent Thatchers disciples, determined to complete her revolution against socialism, i.e. the post-1945 welfare state.
This was built into the very foundations when
Osborne decreed that four-fifths of deficit reduction would come from spending and welfare cuts
and only one-fifth from tax increases.
The Tories talked of a Big Society, of charity
replacing Labours entitlement culture. Yet,
when charity, in the form of food banks, appeared
all over the country, they hated this too. Employment minister Lord Freud sneered at an almost
infinite demand for a free good, ignoring the fact
that access was limited via vouchers issued by
local councils and Job Centres.
The 2012 Health and Social Care Act
presided over by Andrew Lansley fulfilled preelection commitments to the health business sector to introduce full-blown market competition,
realising Thatchers dream of an insurance-based
system where care was the business of profit-making companies.
With education it was the same story. The
Coalition Agreement for Stability and Reform
promised to break open the state monopoly in
schooling. Here the Tories and their Lib-Dem
bag-carriers were as good as their word.
During thirteen years of New Labour, 203 state
schools were transformed into Academies. Under
Gove and his successor Nicky Morgan, this has
risen to over 4,000.
Under the mantra of parental choice, the free
schools are fostering religious segregation, social
exclusion, lowering of professional standards and
a narrow, conservative curriculum. In addition,
state funding has been siphoned into them from
the budget for state schools.
The underlying aim of these reforms was to
make it virtually impossible for any future progressive government to restore the welfare state
that was built up by the central government and
local authorities and paid for from rates and taxation for over half a century.
Now the Tories want to finish the job.
The Conservative Manifesto was drawn up by
William Hague, Theresa May, Michael Gove,
Patrick McLoughlin and George Osborne. All of
them are hardened Thatcher revolutionaries. Once
again, their central pledge will be to eradicate the
deficit by 2018 and secure an overall budget surplus by 2019-20.

This will be done by cutting 12 billion from

welfare spending, not by raising taxes, while
promising to increase NHS spending with an extra
2 billion in frontline services.
So far, the Tories have refused to spell out their
cuts but the BBC has outlined some of the most
likely.
Carers Allowance could be restricted to those
eligible for Universal Credit launched in 2013
to replace six means-tested benefits and tax credits. This would mean 40 per cent of claimants
would lose out, saving 1 billion.
All disability benefits Disability Living Allowance, Personal Independence Payments and
Attendance Allowance would cease to be tax
free, making them effectively means-tested. It is
predicted that 1.5 billion annually could be saved
by this measure.
Changes to the contributory element of unem-

The Tories talked of a Big

Society, of charity replacing
Labours entitlement culture. Yet, when charity, in
the form of Food Banks, appeared all over the country,
they hated this too
ployment benefits Employment Support Allowance (ESA) and Job Seekers Allowance two
(JSA) could see 30 per cent of claimants, over
300,000 families, lose about 80 per week. Total
predicted savings would amount to 1.3 billion in
2018-19.
Child Benefit could be limited to the first two
children, with savings estimated at 1 billion per
annum.
The Industrial Injuries Compensation Scheme
could be replaced by companies providing industrial injury insurance policy for employees.
(BBC). The DWP predicts that this could save 1
billion.
Freezing benefits for working-age people for
years would save 3 billion. They could propose
the withdrawal of Jobseeker's Allowance from
young people after six months, unless they take
part in "community projects". All 18 to 21-yearolds would lose their entitlement to housing benefit.
Commenting on the leaked proposals, the Institute for Fiscal Studies declared that, even if all of
them were implemented, they would not meet the
target of 12 billion. That would require far deeper
cuts.
Then come the political pledges aimed at pandering to the racist Tory media and Ukip. They
will probably pledge once again to bring net immigration down to below 100,000 people a year
(it currently stands at 243,000). Migrants will have
to wait four years before they can claim tax credits, Universal Credit, or gain access to social housing. And the Tories want to remove migrants who
have failed to find work after six months.
Beyond this, there can be little room for doubt
that state education and the NHS would be destroyed.
To sum it all up, the unspoken central goal is to
complete the Thatcher Revolution by destroying
the remnants of the welfare state. That is why
every worker and young person across Britain
should vote to kick the Tories out and then act to
keep them out for good!

6 APRIL 2015 Workers Power

strategy

A working class answ

The 2015 general election comes at a time when workers in Britain and ac

he financial crisis of 2007-08 exposed

to millions that the system wasnt
working, that capitalism was facing a
historic crisis.
The long recession and the austerity that followed were the bosses answer to that crisis:
make the poor pay. We need a working-class response, one that is as uncompromising and combative as the bosses attack.
And we need a mass movement of the kind
we have not seen for decades: as militant as the
miners' strike, as big as the anti-poll tax movement. Here we present our ideas on how to build
such a movement and what it should fight for.
We believe the best possible conditions for
such a battle would be under a Labour government. The unions and the millions of workingclass Labour voters could force Ed Miliband
and Ed Balls to the left and forge a new mass
socialist party if they dont.
For this reason, we place many of our demands on a future Labour government, although
they remain demands that we still need to fight
for from below.

Full employment on proper

contracts and a living wage
Two million people have been thrown on the
scrapheap, rotting away on the dole.
Yet British workers have the longest working
week in Europe, with millions working six,
seven, eight hours overtime every week, often
unpaid. Four million self-employed workers
often slave away for even longer, earning on average just half the minimum wage.
A Labour government should introduce a
maximum working week of 35 hours, sharing
out the available work, with no loss of pay.
Two million are struggling on zero-hours
contracts, a throwback to the days when people
had to turn up at the docks every day to compete
for a days work. Ed Miliband says Labour
would outlaw the use of such contracts for
longer than 12 weeks. We say ban them completely and offer all workers permanent contracts with full employment rights from day one.
Labour also promises to raise the minimum
wage to 8 an hour, but this is not enough. We
support the TUC demand for 10 an hour now
and so should Labour. In the USA, there is a
vibrant campaign for $15 Now, launching
strikes at fast food joints to secure it. The unions
here should follow suit and turn the whole of
Britain into a living wage zone.

Stop the attacks on the sick,

the poor and the vulnerable
The official unemployment figures mask the
real picture, as millions seeking work are hidden
from the statistics because of harsh sanctions by
the Department of Work and Pensions.
They should end the punitive regime at Job
Centres, which regularly stops the benefits of
claimants for minor mistakes, like missing an
appointment by a few minutes or forgetting to
bring a document to an interview: six weeks
sanction for first offence, 13 weeks' for a second and three years' the third time round.
Increasingly, the jobless are made to work for
up to 30 hours a week, stacking shelves for
Tesco and the like on workfare schemes for
free, and with no guaranteed job at the end. The
only alternative is to lose their benefits.
The prospects for disabled people are even
worse. The constant testing of disability
claimants at the hands of Atos and the like is
rightly infamous. In the Coalitions first term,
10,600 claimants died while undergoing assessment, 1,300 of whom were still designated fit
for work even as they were dying. Over 30
people have committed suicide because of the
stress.
Falling real wages and the proliferation of
low paid work now means that most of the ben-

efits bill is directed to working people, with taxpayers subsidising miserly employers.
A Labour government should reverse all the
cuts to benefits and end the sanctions regime
immediately. They should raise benefits and
pensions to a level that allows everyone to live
with dignity. We support direct action by activist
groups like Disabled People Against Cuts
(DPAC) to highlight this crime against the most
vulnerable.

Save the NHS

The National Health Service is being cut and
privatised by stealth. The Coalition has cut 20
billion from the NHS and is outsourcing resources and procedures to profiteers like Serco,
Circle, Virgin Care and even Sainsburys.
Four out of five hospitals are in deficit. More
unit closures, longer waiting lists, more unnecessary deaths loom.
Now the government is handing over Manchester NHS to a new super-authority. This will
break up the NHS and turn it into even more of
a postcode lottery than it already is.
Labours promise of more money and staff is
welcome but will not stop the rot. Its pledge to
repeal Andrew Lansleys Health and Social
Care Act is a step in the right direction, but it
needs also to:
Tax the rich to fully fund the NHS
Reverse the cuts, privatisation and abolish the
PFI deals
Put the NHS under workers and patients democratic control.
We can pile on the pressure not to backslide by
mounting local and national campaigns, like the
ones in Lewisham, Ealing and Shropshire and
Keep Our NHS Public, as well as by supporting
the health unions when they strike against cuts,
closures and wage restraint.

Education is a right
There are now 3,904 academies and free
schools, including a majority of secondary
schools, a ten-fold increase in just five years.
Whereas before, state schools worked together
and were controlled by local authorities, now
they compete against each other, and answer
only to the Education Secretary in Westminster.
Not only are academies not raising standards,
they are also re-introducing selection criteria on
the sly, creating preferentially treated schools
for sharp-elbowed middle class parents and sink
schools for the rest. And they are open to profiteers; the head and director of Durand primary
school in Lambeth cream off 940,000 a year
from the education budget between them.
No wonder teachers are so overworked and
stressed that four out of ten new teachers resign
in their first year. What a waste!
So whats the answer? Return all academies
and free schools to the local authorities, end selection and run them under the control of teachers, parents and school students themselves.
Reinstate the Building Schools for the Future
programme and fund their modernisation.
Labour knows this makes sense, but it is hamstrung by Tony Blairs previous championing of
academies. We need to make them do the right
thing, while supporting strikes and campaigns,
like the one in Lewisham, to resist the imposition of academy status on our schools.
Further education colleges also need to be
brought back in-house and the funding gap with
secondary schools eliminated. The Education
Maintenance Allowance (EMA) for over-16s
should be restored and updated, and tuition fees
abolished.

Housing for all

There are 5 million people stuck on housing
waiting lists, far outstripping the 120,000 homes
built each year. Up to a third of council homes
are deemed unfit to live in, in them many of the

3.6 million children living in poverty.

Margaret Thatchers right to buy policy destroyed much of the housing stock, while councils were forbidden to use the revenues to build
more units. Scandalously Labour continued this
scheme, while the Tories threaten to extend it to
housing association tenants.
Far from encouraging owner occupancy, it
has created a new breed of private slumlords,
owning dozens of ex-council dwellings and
charging three or four times council rents. Buy
to let landlords have pushed house prices way
out of the range of most working families and
have sent rents spiralling out of control.
The final straw is the demolition of perfectly
good social housing so that developers can build
luxury flats, socially cleansing our neighbourhoods in the process. The infamous bedroom
tax has added to this by pricing families, twothirds of them with disabled members, out of
their homes.
A Labour government should do what the
1945-51 government did: build a million new
council homes and let them out at a quarter of
market rents. It should restore rent controls and
grant all tenants full rights, including the right
to run their estates democratically.
To make sure Labour does this, tenants need
to launch militant campaigns, including rent
strikes and occupations, like the Focus E15
Mums in East London, and the union movement needs to back them up with strikes if necessary.

Save the planet

Capitalism poisons the planet with fossil fuels,
the main cause of climate change. Last year was
the hottest ever in the UK, and severe weather
events like the floods in Somerset and the Midlands are becoming more common. Yet the Tories response is to advise those affected to take
out exorbitant private insurance, while riding

roughshod over local peoples objections to introduce fracking across the UK.
Instead of giving sweeteners and price guarantees to private nuclear power providers like
EDF, we should be investing in renewable energy. Currently Britain only relies on renewables for 5 per cent of our energy needs,
compared with 51 per cent in Sweden.
Labour should:
Nationalise the energy companies without
compensation and slash household bills
Phase out nuclear power, stop fracking and
end our reliance on fossil fuel
Invest in renewables, like wind, tidal and solar,
and in flood defences

Seize the banks

give us back our money
In 2008-09, Gordon Brown handed over 1 trillion of taxpayers money to save the banks from
collapse because they were too big to fail. Instead, our social fabric our ability to look after
the young, the elderly and the infirm was
made to fail.
Suddenly, from being a kindly benefactor
who saved the banks, the state became an indebted borrower who had to pay back the
bondholders. These shadowy bondholders,
rather conveniently, turn out to be the same fund
managers and bankers we saved in the first
place.
This giant swindle means that working-class
people are being made to pay for the capitalist
crisis. We say, no more: cancel the debt now.
We know from Syrizas experience in Greece
that this would lead to all sorts of threats from
foreign governments and international institutions, not to mention the banks themselves.
But rather than be blackmailed and forced to
climb down, a government committed to work-

Workers Power APRIL 2015 7

wer to Britains crisis

strategy

ross Europe are asking whether there is an alternative to capitalist austerity

them.
We say:
Self-defence is no offence for organised resistance to racist attacks
Open the borders grant all who want to live
and work here full citizenship rights
Combat every instance of racism, however it
manifests itself
For trade union and community monitoring of
racist incidents, and direct action to end them

Nations and institutions

The great recession has certainly opened a constitutional crisis in Britain. The Scottish people
came close to breaking away; the Tories, egged
on by Ukip, question the UKs membership of
the EU; and Prince Charles secret letters pose
the question of the role of the monarchy.
Our starting point on all these questions
should be to fight for the greatest unity of the
working class.
The Scottish people are not oppressed as a nation. Scottish workers are as exploited as the rest
of us, but their best chance of ending this is
alongside the workers of England and Wales.
Therefore we say, no to Scottish independence
and yes to a united fightback against austerity.
Backbench Tories and Ukip want Britain out
of Europe for racist reasons. An independent
Britain would still attack the working class. On
the other hand, the EU is a bosses club designed
to drive down workers wages, conditions and
rights. We say, neither independence nor the EU,
but a socialist united states of Europe.
Abolish the monarchy and the House of
Lords, both hideously undemocratic relics of a
feudal past. For a workers republic!

Oppose British imperialism

ing-class interests should go on the offensive. It

should nationalise the banks, merge them together and democratically allocate their vast assets to renewing our communities and
rebuilding our social services. Strict exchange
controls could stop the rich from hiding their
money or shifting it overseas.
Alongside increasing local and national taxes
on the rich, taking the poorest out of taxation altogether and ending the scandal of tax avoidance
and evasion, this could allow a workers government to democratically plan production and
services to meet peoples needs, through local
and national assemblies.

Combat police violence

The horrendous extent of police violence,
snooping and lawbreaking has been revealed
over the past five years.
From the daily harassment of (mainly black)
youth through stop and search to the unpunished
deaths of over 1,000 people at the hands of the
police since 1990, Britains law enforcers are inextricably linked to violence.
And we can add to this the undercover surveillance of protest groups, including Stephen
Lawrences family, which even saw agents starting families with their targets; the cover-ups by
senior officers over their conduct at Hillsborough and Orgreave, despite the lives they ruined
and the tireless campaigns to get to the truth; and
the mass surveillance of our phone-calls, texts
and emails by spy centre GCHQ, conducted
even behind Parliaments back.
The conclusion is simple. A Labour government should:
End stop and search
Bring all those responsible for police racism,
violence and cover-ups to justice

Disband all armed police and surveillance

units shut down GCHQ

No tolerance for racism

immigrants welcome here
Racism is still rife in Britain. Black people are
26 times more likely to be stopped and searched,
and are then more likely to be arrested, charged,
to receive a custodial sentence and to spend
longer in prison.
The same discrimination can be found in jobs
and education. Despite being just 5 per cent of
the population, 25 per cent of long-term unemployed youth are black; and in general, black
workers are twice as likely to be unemployed.
Black students are less likely to achieve five
good GCSEs; less than 1 per cent of students in
the top universities are black.
Perhaps even more acute is the racism directed at immigrants and Muslims though
many in these groups are also black.
Successive governments have whipped up
racist fears and sought to blame immigrants for
everything from the lack of housing to NHS
waiting times, mass unemployment and low
wages.
Every atrocity by an Islamist group is blamed,
not on Britains occupation of Iraq and
Afghanistan, but on extremism within
Britains Muslim minorities. The actions of a
tiny minority do not cause British imperialism
to be placed under the microscope, but instead
cause every single Muslim in the country to be
suspected of harbouring a zealous contempt for
human life.
Why is all this still with us? Because dividing
the population by race or ethnicity helps prevent working-class people from coming together
to fight the real enemy: capitalism and imperialism. And we have more in common with migrant workers than with the bosses who exploit

Britain is the sixth richest nation in the world. It

didnt achieve this position peacefully, or maintain it that way either. In fact, Britain is one of a
handful of robber nations that uses its financial
muscle and military might to secure privileges
over other peoples.
British troops occupied Afghanistan and Iraq
for a decade or more, leaving behind a legacy of
sectarian division, torture and economic destruction. Britain still denies the right of the Irish people as a whole to determine their future, and
claims sovereignty over the north-east of Ireland.
The City of London and British multinational
giants, like HSBC and BP, are at the centre of a
web that systematically appropriates resources
from around the world and that denies poorer
countries the right to develop their own
economies with their own natural resources.
Not a penny or a person for the defence of the
system
Troops out of the Middle East, Ireland and all
foreign bases Britain out of Nato
For the defeat of Britain in any armed conflict
the main enemy is at home

Transform the labour

movement
None of these demands can be achieved without
rallying people on the streets, in schools and colleges, and in our workplaces. Strikes and occupations, mass demonstrations and direct action
must be at the heart of any strategy to beat austerity.
While we should demand that a Labour government carries out measures in defence of the
working class, we know that they will only do
so if faced with a mass movement.
The lesson of the last five years of stalled
struggles is that, given a strong lead, millions
will respond to a call to action; but also that our
current leaders have no stomach for a real fight.
Instead of strikes remaining at the level of
one-day protests, we have to escalate them, to

all-out indefinite strikes if necessary. Instead of

union bureaucrats deciding when we should
strike and for how long, elected and accountable
strike committees, made up of the workers who
are taking the action, should call the shots.
Instead of coordinated action led from
above (that quickly becomes un-coordinated
once the pressure from below has died down),
we need to link our struggles together from
below and fight for a general strike.
Of course the union leaders should endorse
these tactics, but we need organisations at the
base to force them to do so and to deliver action without them if necessary.
Lets unite in councils of action in every town
and city, where delegates from all the campaigns, neighbourhoods and workplaces can
come together to decide on action and carry it
out. Lets group together the best trade unionists
into a rank and file movement to democratise
the unions and win them to decisive action.
Last but not least, we know that Labour in
office or in opposition will not lead the resistance to austerity. The Blairite right wing will
tear the party to shreds before that happens.
We therefore need to fight for a new mass
working-class party, one that does not regard
winning elections as its be all and end all, or
grant privileges to party leaders, MPs and councillors, but that sets as its aim the overthrow of
the capitalist system by any means necessary.

From resistance to revolution

The most urgent task facing us in this election
is to rally the forces that can stop the cuts. Whoever wins, the next government will attack us,
with 40 per cent of the planned cuts still to
come. Only this time, they plan to wipe out
every gain the working class has made since
1945.
While socialists should campaign for a
Labour victory, we should have our eyes fully
open to Labour's record and policies. Labour has
denounced strikes, accepted the Coalitions cuts
and its spending limits for the next two years,
and joined in the attacks on benefit claimants.
Labour has always accepted that reforms
must come second to profits, that it will make
concessions to working-class interests only
when capitalism is thriving. This makes it a
bosses party at core, despite its working-class
support. We need a new party, one uncompromisingly committed to the fight for socialism.
But even if such a party had a majority of
MPs in Parliament, with an anticapitalist programme like the one outlined here, it would
meet resistance from the unelected parts of the
state, the international markets and the other imperialist powers.
We have seen what these forces have done to
the Greek anti-austerity government. We know
what they do to our picket lines, our demonstrations and our communities. We remember the
crimes of British imperialism in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Ireland. Just imagine what they
would do if their power and wealth were fundamentally challenged.
Only a revolution that breaks up the machinery of repression, wins over the rank and file of
the army, arms the people and creates a workers
militia will be able to impose its will on today's
ruling class of capitalists and billionaires.
To make sure a revolutionary government
does not in turn produce a new elite, it will need
to be based upon national assemblies of elected
and recallable delegates, elected by local and regional councils of action representing all working people, without privileges for anyone.
On this basis it will be possible to plan the
economy democratically, and take giant steps towards eliminating poverty, exploitation and inequality. Such a revolution would be a beacon
to working-class across the world, encouraging
them to take on their own ruling elites, and
opening up the possibility of building a new, socialist order.

8 APRIL 2015 Workers Power

the left

Learning the lessons

The last five years provide invaluable lessons of how not to organise an effective resistance
BERNIE MCADAM

o sooner had the Con-Dem coalition been sworn in than it delivered

an 83 billion programme of spending cuts. Despite Tory promises not
to axe frontline services, it quickly became
clear that they were out to slash hundreds of
thousands of public sector jobs, freeze pay, cut
pensions and launch a mammoth attack on our
welfare state: the biggest cuts in British history.
And this was all to pay for the 1.3 trillion
bailout of the banks during the 2008 credit
crunch. Working-class families would pay for
the billions lost by the capitalists, whose system caused the crisis in the first place.
So what did the leaders of the Labour Party
and the trade unions do in response?
First up was Ed Miliband. Elected Labour
leader thanks to trade union votes, he lost no
time in reassuring big business that he would
not obstruct the cuts. He denounced irresponsible strikes and insisted that he was not going
to oppose every cut the government comes up
with.
Then came Ed Balls, asserting that there
would be no reversal of the cuts and no return
to tax and spend. He remains committed to
the Tories spending plans, explaining that for
us to come along now and say we will plan to
spend more in 2015-16 would be completely
irresponsible.
Most union leaders took their cue from
Labour. They prefer to wait for Labour to return to power over stopping the cuts in the here
and now. It took nearly a year for the TUC to
organise a demonstration against the cuts on 26
March 2011. And while hundreds of thousands
of angry union members responded to this call,
the TUC leaders had no intention of using it as
a springboard for action.
In fact, the first real opposition to the cuts
came with the student and youth rebellion
against hikes in university tuition fees and the
scrapping of the Educational Maintenance Allowance at the end of 2010. The Coalition was
shaken by tens of thousands of students on the
streets and by the occupation of the Tory party
headquarters.
Student assemblies held in occupied campus
halls led these mobilisations, in direct conflict
with the official student union leaders. And
they posed the question: if students can mobilise, then why not workers?

Pensions debacle
It took the governments attack on public sector
pensions for the unions to make their move.
The first coordinated national strike over pensions was called on 30 June 2011 by four
unions: the NUT, ATL, UCU and the PCS, organising teachers, lecturers and civil servants.
This was followed by another one-day strike on
30 November 2011, in which 29 unions
brought out 2 million workers across the public
sector, a fantastic mobilisation that showed
how determined people were to fight. That
message however clearly alarmed their leaders.
Within a fortnight this alliance had fractured.
The leaders of the largest public sector unions,
Dave Prentis of Unison and Paul Kenny of the

talions without a fight.

Anticuts campaigns

GMB, signed no-strike agreements to pursue

scheme-by-scheme talks that produced few
new concessions.
The smaller, left-led unions had no response.
They had peddled the myth that by striking
over a legal trade dispute, they could cajole
the right-led unions into supporting coordinated action without confronting the anti-union
laws. In fact, the rights simply decoupled the
disputes, leaving the lefts in the lurch. The
self-styled Marxists of the Socialist Party (SP)
and Socialist Workers Party (SWP) had disgracefully gone along with this wheeze.
Faced with disaffection from below, the TUC
leaders then launched a cynical consultation
over whether a general strike was feasible.
For a whole year, the architects of the pensions
defeat pretended to search for a way to call for
class-wide action. Unsurprisingly, when the
year was up, the idea was quietly dropped.
This debacle was repeated three years later
when public service unions finally woke up to
the clamour to fight against the three-year pay
freeze. Public sector salaries have declined 15
per cent in real terms under the Tories, leaving
many having to claim benefits to top up their
measly earnings.
Coordinated action in July 2014 saw one
million strike across local government, schools,
colleges, the civil service and fire stations. Talk
of NHS staff joining the walkout in October,
however, was too much for some union leaders,
with lecturers, railworkers and finally and decisively local government officers being told to
step down.
At no point did the larger of the far left
groups warn that the traitors leading our movement would betray us, let alone organise to
defy their sell-out.
The Health and Social Care Act (2012) represented the biggest attack yet on the National
Health Service. It undermined the principle of
free, universal and comprehensive healthcare,
outsourcing most of the NHS budget to GPs.
Meanwhile cuts continued to produce hospital
mergers, the loss of beds and the closure of

RESISTING UNITY

A&E departments.
Scandalously this Act was passed without
the unions or the Labour Party even holding a
national demonstration. Our leaders passivity
emboldened the Tories.
In the absence of a national lead, many vibrant local campaigns were set up, like the successful campaign to save Lewisham Hospital.
However, more determined national action
could have stopped the Tories in their tracks. A
general strike to save the NHS could have torn
apart the coalition, with any attempt to ban it
amounting to political suicide.

Grangemouth
The private sector had its own rhythm of struggle, though no different conclusion. Militant
action by individual groups of workers showed
what could be done.
Hovis workers in Wigan fought off zerohours contracts and a two-tier workforce by
launching wave after wave of week-long
strikes and mass pickets. Cinema staff at the
Ritzy in Brixton won a similar dispute and a 26
per cent pay rise with 13 strikes in quick succession.
Electricians on construction sites, the Sparks
as they became known, faced new contracts
with a 30 per cent pay cut. Rank and file organisation, weekly demos, occupations and pickets
helped them pick up members and momentum.
The mere threat of a strike forced the bosses to
back down.
But the big set-piece battle was at Grangemouth, near Falkirk. Here Unite the Union had
defeated an attack on pensions back in 2008.
But billionaire owner Jim Ratcliffe was out for
revenge. Having provoked a strike ballot by
victimising a convenor, he threatened to close
the petrochemical plant for good.
While shop stewards refused to blink, Unite's
left leader Len McCluskey did. The strike
was called off, a no-strike agreement signed
and jobs were given away. Britain's biggest
union sacrificed one of its best organised bat-

If the union leaders presented the biggest obstacle to a struggle against austerity, then what
role has the far left played? Though small, it
could have offered an alternative way forward.
Instead, the last five years have witnessed a divided and directionless anticuts movement.
No less than three rival national anti-cuts
campaigns have been set up: the National Shop
Stewards Network (NSSN), backed by the SP;
Unite the Resistance (UtR), backed by the
SWP; and the Coalition of Resistance (CoR),
courtesy of Counterfire, the Communist Party
of Britain and Socialist Resistance.
What a mess! The bosses and the Tories must
have been laughing their heads off. The best
chance of uniting them came and went with the
launch of the Peoples Assembly Against Austerity in June 2013. But it also has no effective
strategy for halting the cuts.
Just holding rallies, demonstrations and carnivals while echoing the unions leaders complacency is not enough. What we needed was
one umbrella group, where delegates from
union branches, campaigns and student organisations could have discussed and agreed
on a united course of action.
But these sects would rather be lord over
their own little campaign, rather than unite to
fight the cuts.

The fight goes on

Whether we have an austerity-heavy Tory-led
government or an austerity-lite Labour one, we
will need new methods of struggle and new organisations to defend our public services and
our living standards.
Common to all the union leaders is a refusal
to make their struggles against the effects of
the cuts on their members wages and conditions into a class-wide political struggle
against the government. They prefer to keep
on the right side of the anti-union laws,
which ban political strikes and enforce a narrow definition of what constitutes a legitimate
trade dispute.
So we need a new fighting leadership of the
unions, based on rank and file organisations
within every union and across the unions. We
need coordinating councils of action drawing
in all the strands of struggle into an almighty
fist to clobber the bosses. We need to build on
the positives from the likes of the Hovis and
Ritzy workers, and the Sparks.
A militant fight back will also mean taking
on the pro-Labour ideas of many of our union
leaders. We should demand that Labour refuse
to implement austerity, but the idea that we can
win Labour for the unions as Len McCluskey would have it let alone socialism is
wrong.
The unions should break with Labour and
hold a democratic conference to form a new
anti-austerity and anticapitalist working-class
party. This could completely revitalise the
labour movement, and hasten an end to austerity and the capitalist system that demands it.

Workers Power APRIL 2015 9

the left

Labour of Sisyphus

Each election is a chance for the centrist left to rehearse tried and failed approaches
MARCUS HALABY

n this years General Election, we support

candidates of the socialist left as part of a
project of building an alternative to the
Labour Party. In particular we call for a
vote for Left Unity, which we are part of, and
for the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition
(Tusc), which is supported by the rail workers'
union RMT and by the two largest groups on
the British far left: the Socialist Party and
SWP.
Everywhere else we call for a vote for
Labour, despite its commitment to Tory spending plans and its poor record in opposing the
Con-Dem coalitions austerity policies. This
goes alongside our raising demands on Labour
to break with its policy of austerity-lite, and to
take measures in defence of the interests of its
millions of working class voters.
The logic behind this position is simple. Millions of working class people will be voting
Labour, whatever we or anyone else on the far
left have to say on the matter. They will do so
because they quite rightly sense that their most
immediate, vicious and deadly enemy is the
Con-Dem coalition and that a new Tory or
Tory-led government would be the worst possible outcome.
While striking a united front to secure a
Labour government, we still warn voters that
the struggle against austerity will not end with
a Labour victory. But it will take the experience of a Labour government in power for millions of the party's core voters to learn this.
At the same time, a sizeable minority of
working class people already understand that
Labour is not just an inadequate instrument in
the struggle against austerity and capitalist crisis, but a huge obstacle to that struggle. To
them we say: join us in the fight for a new mass
party of the working class, by joining Left
Unity and by supporting the Left Unity and
Tusc candidates in this election.

Socialist Party and SWP

As straightforward as this sounds, there is no
consensus on the left. The largest far left group,
the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), is part of
Tusc and fielding a number of election candidates through it. Its paper argued in January
that Labour gives no alternative to the Tories
and called on its readers to vote for socialists
in May. It has called since for people to support Tusc candidates in the general election and
to build a socialist alternative.
But the SWP has nothing to say about Left
Unitys candidates or indeed about Labour
outside of the 136 constituencies where Tusc
candidates will be standing. And unlike Left
Unity, Tusc is not an organisation with local
branches that people can join, making it a
problematic vehicle for building a socialist alternative.
Even more hostile to Labour is the SP, the
other main affiliate to Tusc. In an editorial in
its newspaper, its deputy general secretary
Hannah Sell notes that Labour lost 5 million
votes under Blair and Brown, with present
Labour leader Ed Miliband failing to win most
of these votes back since, and faces a melt-

REPEATING THE SAME ERRORS AND EXPECTING A DIFFERENT RESULT

down in Scotland.
She argues that: At root this is because
Labour today is a capitalist party. Unlike in the
past when old Labour, though it had a capitalist
leadership, was nonetheless a workers party
at its base. It could, via its democratic structures, be pressured by the working class. In the
past when Labour had been defeated, particularly after 1979, a strong leftward move developed in the ranks of the Labour Party.
Following 2010 this has been completely absent. Labours pro-austerity programme has
been accepted by the party with barely any
protest.
Noting that Labours democratic structures
have long since been destroyed, Sell concludes that we need to build a new party of
the working class, and that if a significant
section of the trade union movement had taken
this path during the last five years we could
face a very different political terrain today.
True enough, but in the course of this argument, she suggests that calling for a vote for
Labour is to foster illusions that Labour offers
a real alternative, and that doing this entails
taking some responsibility for the actions of a
future Labour government.
What's wrong with this argument? For a
start, Sell paints a rose-tinted view of what
Labour was like in the past, when the Socialist
Partys predecessor the Militant Tendency was
committed to a strategy of remaining inside the
party at all costs. Its not a true picture.
In the 1980s, Labour denounced the miners
strike, in the 1970s they pushed through pay
restraint while inflation was riding high, even
the famous 1945-51 Labour government sent
soldiers to break strikes. Always from Ireland to the far east and the south Atlantic
Labour has followed an imperialist foreign
policy.

But the SP rewrites history for a reason.

When they were in Labour, they camouflaged
themselves as left reformists, insisting that a
Labour government could implement a socialist transition without the need for revolution.
Now they are outside, they campaign for a new
reformist party, peddling the same illusion
so they have to claim that Labour is no longer
a reformist party.
Nor does it follow at all that calling for a
vote for Labour means promoting illusions in
it or taking responsibility for its actions in
power.
Millions of people will be voting Labour, the
majority of them without reading a single
leaflet or editorial from the far left. Some will
swallow Labours rhetoric whole, others with
longer memories will be more cynical.
But almost all have illusions that Labour
will act as a shield against the worst aspects of
austerity illusions we seek to dispel by placing concrete demands on Labour. If Sell thinks
that without far left support, Labour's vote
would collapse, she has another think coming.
Of course, the SP and SWP are both responding to a real problem, that Labour has
moved so far to the right that parties, like the
Greens and the SNP, with no connections to the
labour movement at all, look well to the left of
Labour.
But while we recognise that Labour has no
intention of offering a real alternative to capitalist austerity, we must also understand that
the struggle to force Labour to do just that is
at one and the same time the struggle to assemble the forces that can provide that alternative.

The AWL
On the opposite pole of this debate, the Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL) have

launched the Socialist Campaign for a Labour

Victory (SCLV). They argue: For all its woeful inadequacies and shameful betrayals, and
despite changes in its structure, Labour remains supported, funded and organisationally
tied to workers basic class organisations, the
trade unions.
They continue: Because Labour remains
linked to the unions because they could use
their voice in the party to shift its course, if
they chose to we should support the election
of a Labour government. But if we are going
to avoid becoming footsoldiers for the Labour
leadership, we need to do more than that.
The more than that the AWL propose,
however, consists merely of a demand that the
unions stop covering politically for the Labour
leadership, and start fighting for workers in
the first instance, by actually campaigning for
union policies.
The SCLV therefore supports campaigns to
change Labours policies on tuition fees, the
renationalisation of the railways and other issues, and advocates a workers' plan of demands to remake society in the interests of the
majority by taxing the rich, expropriating the
banks and creating a workers government.
But the AWL, despite acknowledging that
the best course of action would be a strong
slate of class struggle socialist candidates, to
champion workers interests, raise the profile
of socialism and put pressure on Labour from
the left, nevertheless dismisses the efforts of
both Left Unity and Tusc.
They claim that standing left of Labour candidates is not on the cards as they will be
weak both organisationally and politically.
This will be news for the SNP, which is on the
verge of wiping Labour of the map in Scotland
precisely by standing to its left.
Undeterred, however, the AWL says that
the TUSC effort for 7 May is an inferior
way to build socialist awareness than the
SCLV, describing TUSC as a cartel of the SP
and the leading officials of the RMT union
and Left Unity as a small group pretending to
be a broad left party like Die Linke in Germany, and neither politically nor organisationally better than TUSC.
Whatever the genuine limitations of Tusc as
a coalition without individual membership or
an active internal life, or of the Left Unity leaderships strategy of filling the space to the left
of Labour by invoking the spirit of 1945, the
AWLs approach provides no political framework and no organisational form for forcing
Labour to implement any of the demands that
it places on a future Labour government.
Is it really inferior to support candidates
who openly say Labour cannot be reformed
and the British working class needs to build a
new party committed to the fight for socialism?
Is it really superior to peddle the illusion (yet
again) that Labour can be won to socialist policies and party democracy? Dream on!
In fact the emergence of a real alternative to
Labours strategy will have to be built outside
of the party. Which means that the struggle to
put Labour to the test of office and the struggle
to build an alternative to it will have to go hand
in hand.

0 APRIL 2015 Workers Power

greece

The turn of the screw

FortheTroika,democracymustbenoobstacletomakinganexampleoutofGreece
DAVESTOCKTON

he government of Greece, elected

after years of popular resistance to
austerity, has immediately been subjected to the blackmail of the institutions of international finance capital and the
European Union.
They want to make an example of Greece in
order to intimidate any other countries that
might think of voting to reject the destruction
of living standards and public services. Supporting the demand to break the EU rulers'
stranglehold on Greece is immediately linked
to breaking the hold of austerity across the
whole continent.
Faced with the threat of the withdrawal of all
financial support and expulsion from the Eurozone, which would have triggered a collapse of
the country's economy, Greece needs the practical support of workers, youth and all progressive forces across the continent.

Imperialism
Those responsible for these threats sit in the
governments of the most powerful EU states
and on the boards of the banks and financial institutions, in Berlin, Frankfurt, Paris and the
City of London. To aid Greece means striking
back at them; they are the enemies of all workers across the continent.
Wolfgang Schuble, Germanys Finance
Minister, has been brutally frank. Elections
change nothing was his response to the Greek
governments democratic mandate to end austerity.
The smaller and weaker states and economies
count for little in a European Union dominated
by a handful of rich and powerful states. This
domination of the weak by the strong has a
name: imperialism.
The EU is an imperialist trading block, dominated by a few big powers, with a common
currency tailored to the needs of their banks, industrial and commercial corporations. It is thus
able to trample on the democracy of the smaller
states and to impose a stranglehold over their
economies and the social welfare of their citizens.
The Troika, now referred to as the Institutions, is determined to force the Syriza government into a humiliating surrender and
continuation of the austerity imposed by the
previous three governments in Athens.

IMF medicine
The so-called Greek bailouts are not bailing out the Greek people at all. They are bailing
out the countrys northern European creditors,
the bank shareholders and bondholders who,
like the worst loan sharks, lured Greek governments into massive debt to offset the economic
subordination of Greece to Germany. Greek
governments only kept within the Eurozone by
massive borrowing in the northern European
capitals. And the banks were only too happy to
let them.
For ten years Wall Street big names like
Goldman Sachs helped to conceal the regulation-busting scale of Greek debt. When the
bailouts began in 2010, 310 billion had al-

SCRAP THE TROIKA

ready been advanced to the Greek government

by the European banking and financial sector,
much of it from Germany and France. They had
expected decades of lucrative interest payments
but then came the great crash of 2008-09.
Since then, the Troika has lent a further

elections
change
nothing
WOLFGANG SCHAEUBLE,
GERMAN FINANCE MINISTER

252 billion to the Greek government. This did

not go into funding wages or social services for
the Greek people, as the gutter press likes to
suggest. 149.2 billion of it went on repaying
the original debt and the interest on it, 34.5
billion went to compensate private lenders for
the 2012 debt restructuring, and 48.2 billion
went to bail out Greek banks and their foreign
investors.
The results of this aid have been catastrophic. Since the imposition of the Memorandum, Greeces economy has shrunk by 28.7 per
cent. Some 27 per cent of its workers are unemployed, a figure rising to over 50 per cent for
under-25s. Some 200,000 young Greeks have
left the country in search of work in the north.
Popular consumption has fallen by 40 per cent
and 40 per cent could not afford to heat their
homes this winter.
But Greece was not the only country to suffer
the austerity poison. Nor have they taken it
without resistance. In the years 2008-12, there
were fight backs against these policies in the
form of mass demonstrations, occupations and
general strikes, in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and other countries across Europe. Then
came the rise of left or socialist parties, in par-

ticular Greeces Syriza and Spains Podemos,

which grew dramatically precisely because they
promised to end austerity altogether.

Capitalist crisis
The origins of austerity policy do not lie
solely in the thirty year dominance of the economic doctrine called neoliberalism. Nor do
they lie solely in the fact that the EU is an institution dominated by a few major imperialist
powers, headed by Germany and the European
Central Bank in Frankfurt, or that rivalry between the emerging three global imperialist
blocks results in beggar-my-neighbour polices
that harm everyone apart from the super-rich.
Ultimately, they originate in a capitalism in
decline, mired in a deep, prolonged historic crisis. This crisis drives states, as well as industrial, commercial and financial institutions, to
unload the burden of recovering their profitability onto the working class at home, and onto
weaker states and economies abroad.
And this is the reason why the election of reformist governments like Syriza is insufficient
to stand up to a global capitalism determined to
make the working class in Greece (and in
Britain) pay the full price of restoring their
profit rates.
Syriza, for all its radicalism and the enthusiasm of its voters, came to power as a reformist
government, one without the backing of a mobilised working class ready to enforce its measure and keep it under their control. That is why
prime minister Alexis Tsipras and finance minister Yanis Varoufakis tried to persuade the EU
to relent, rather than setting out to force it to do
so by mobilising the Greek workers as the
agents of their own liberation. The strategy of
negotiation, of trying to divide the governments
and institutions of the European Union, has
proved fruitless.
Now Varoufakis has said Greece will meet
all obligations to all its creditors, ad infinitum. If Greece does, this will prove an abject
surrender and a scandalous betrayal of the

workers and youth of Greece.

Syriza must be stopped from going down the
path of PASOK and previous Greek governments. If they surrender now, then Syriza will
collapse like a pricked bubble, and the desperate
masses could turn to the far right. It is vital that
revolutionaries and the militant trade unions remobilise the organisations of the workers, the
small farmers and the youth to halt any such betrayal.
In doing so they can create a force capable of
overthrowing the power of the European and
Greek billionaires and their politicians and generals. What Greece needs to survive is nothing
less than a revolutionary workers government,
backed up by workers across the continent.
A campaign to come to the aid of Greek
workers and youth should start with a Europewide day of mass demonstrations, supported by
all the trade union federations, and by their rank
and file and workplace organisations if the
union leaders drag their heels. The political parties of the left, great and small, must be urged
to take part along with their MPs and national
leaderships. Here, too, a militant minority in the
membership must take the lead from below, if
there is no leadership from above.
We need a day of militant mass demonstrations in all the major cities of the EU as a first
step, to break the spell of the media and politicians' lies about the lazy Greeks.
This in turn needs to be escalated, as rapidly
as possible, into a Europe-wide day of action,
including strike action, and direct action against
the Institutions, and against governments who
continue to threaten and rob Greece.
This needs to be linked to the demand for an
end to austerity in every EU country, including
those not in the Eurozone, and for the ripping
up of the treaties and agreements that impose
balanced budgets and limits on social spending while preventing the taxation of the bankers,
CEOs and mega-corporations.
We need to expose the racket of debt repayment, showing that the money saved by cutting health and education and by selling off state
assets ends up boosting the fortunes of the rich,
which have risen to dizzying heights at the same
time as wages have plummeted. We need to
open the books of the banks and financial institutions and put a stop to their profiteering. In
short, we need to make the rich pay for their crisis.
We urgently need a Europe-wide assembly to
plan and organise such a movement, with delegates from all the above-mentioned organisations, similar to those mounted by the European
Social Forum and the antiwar movement in the
early 2000s.
Can we do this? Yes we can! Indeed, we must!
Solidarity with the working people of Greece
An end to Austerity in Greece and Europewide
Cancel the Debt in its entirety
Open the accounts of the national banks and
the ECB to workers' and public scrutiny and
control
Reject privatisations across the continent
For a Socialist United States of Europe.

Workers Power APRIL 2015

spain

Radically irresponsible

Podemosischasingvotesandditchingprinciplesinitsbidforrespectability
KDTAIT

panish anti-austerity party Podemos (We

Can) won 14.8 per cent and took 15
seats in elections to Andalusias regional
parliament, doubling last years vote in
the European elections. The meteoric rise of the
fledgling party which is leading opinion polls
ahead of general elections this Autumn has provoked intense debate across the European left.
With the victory of Syriza in Greece earlier
this year, many people are taking inspiration
from parties that appear to have overcome the inability of the old reformist left to present any coherent anti-austerity programme, and to win
elections on that basis. Such a development is
welcome, not only because this could alleviate
the worst austerity measures, but because it poses
the question of what kind of government is
needed to put an end to austerity.
It poses the question but does not yet answer
it, as Syriza, caught on the horns of a dilemma,
is demonstrating. The dilemma: to defy the
blackmail of the forces of international capital
and break free from its controls, or to act as its
agents in imposing austerity.
And Podemos is repeating, in a compressed
version, Syrizas trajectory from the radical
fringes towards government, in the process transforming its anti-systemic programme of opposition into a programme of responsible reforms.

The political turn

As with Syriza in 2012, when the party was catapulted from obscurity to prominence following
a wave of social struggles against austerity,
Podemos represents an attempt to give the square
occupations, strikes and mobilisations on the
streets a political expression: a struggle for
power.
The failure and the limited objectives of economic struggles pursued by the trade unions, particularly the UGT, linked to the Spanish Socialist
Party (PSOE), discredited the economic and political institutions dominating the labour movement. This was a major factor in the Indignados'
understandable but ultimately self-defeating ban
on party-political debate in the square occupations.
The Podemos project is an attempt to marry
the political theory of post-Marxist Ernesto
Laclau with the political practice of Latin American populism, the socialism of the 21st Century of Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales etc.
The group of professors from the Complutense University of Madrid around Pablo
Iglesias and Juan Carlos Monedero linked up
with Izquierda Anticapitalista, the Spanish section of the Fourth International, in an effort to
replicate in Spain the tactics that brought about
governments with radical reform agendas in
Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador.
From Latin America comes the idea of mass
participation of the People in local structures
(circulos, a concept lifted from Venezuela) that
provide a base of support for a charismatic leader
who can mobilise them as required against the
common enemy.
From Spain comes the co-option of the 15M movements rejection of a right-left paradigm and, as a chosen enemy, the caste, a

concept whose strength as a mobilising tool is

drawn both from the corruption of the establishment parties, and that also targets the nexus of
state-EU-IMF links that imposes austerity whatever government is elected.
In this way Podemos aims to become a means
of mobilising at the ballot box the potential
power of a politically atomised movement that
originally built itself under the slogan united the
people do not need parties.

Responsible radicals
The rise of Podemos in the polls to highs of 27
per cent has been enthusiastically documented.
Less enthusiastically documented, but no less
important, are the political concessions that
Podemos has made to try and maintain its position against the new right-populist rival Ciudadanos (Citizens), and to position itself as a
responsible party of government.
In its economic programme drawn up in December by two professional economists and
not by the party's structures Podemos abandoned many of the pledges that won it support
in the EU elections. Since December it has jettisoned even more.
The proposal to reduce the retirement age to
60 has been replaced with a commitment to
maintain it at 65, down from 67. The 35-hour
working week is now described in the language
of changes in the labour market to allow Spain
to better compete. The universal income policy has been replaced by state aid for those in
need, and the demand to nationalise the banks
and utilities softened by a proposal to establish
public control through a majority stake. The
abolition of private employment agencies has
disappeared without a trace.
The flagship policy of a citizens audit of the
debt with the renunciation of the illegitimate
state debt has been ditched in favour of the
Syriza model of negotiations. In the words of
party economists Vicen Navarro and Juan Torres Lpez, the new objective is negotiating with
the markets flexible payments of debt, grace
periods and partial haircuts.
The leaders of Podemos think they will have
more success than Syriza because, according to
Iglesias, Spain is not Greece. We are the fourth
economic power of the EU, and our capacity for
negotiation is greater.
In an interview on the American CNBC channel Iglesias explained that We assume that the
market economy is a reality, but that it has its
limits.
In his view, these limits could be overcome
by a patriotic government that for example
could say to the pharmaceutical companies that
they cannot make profits at the expense of people of my country dying.
Fine sentiments, but profiting at the expense
of peoples misery is the reality of a market
economy, and rejecting the tools of radical economic and social reform that puts the working
class in control of making their own economic
reality is not going to change that.
In an interview with The Guardian's Giles
Tremlett, Iglesias said that: In the short term we
are limited to using the state to redistribute a little
more, have fairer taxes, boost the economy and

start building a model that recovers industry and

brings back sovereignty. We accept that the euro
is inescapable.
Podemos is able to get away with this backsliding because of an undemocratic leadership
structure that guarantees tight control of the organisation by the clique around Iglesias and
Monedero. The centrality of a caudillo-style
leader, resting on a plebiscitary leadership election and appearing to stand above factional
squabbles was emphasised in the European elections when, Iglesias face was used to represent
the party on the ballot paper.
When denouncing a rival proposal to institute
a collective leadership against Iglesias proposal
to concentrate power in the hands of the general
secretary (himself), he said Heaven is not taken
by consensus, but by storm.

Caste or class?
Podemos claim their success is attributable to
their rejection of the old symbols and language
of the left, as in the Indignados slogan We are
neither right nor left, we are coming from the
bottom and going for the top.
Confronted with criticism that Podemos does
not propose an assault on the heavens, Iglesias
insists The answer to that is: And where are
your arms for getting rid of capitalism?
This rejection of the language of the left is
a rejection of 150 years of experience and lessons learned the hard way: that society is divided
into antagonistic classes, and that the state does
not sit above them as a neutral set of institutions
to be purged and used for the benefit of one or
the other, but is in fact the honed mechanism of
capitalist class rule. That today there are supranational and international institutions only makes
the prosecution of the class struggle on the international plane more vital.
By trimming its programme to present themselves as responsible candidates for government,
Podemoss leaders are cultivating irresponsible
illusions.
Winning elections on the basis of a narrative
that suits everyone in the end primarily suits the
established caste. The idea that the interests of
workers and bosses can be squared by cooperation between patriotic capitalists and a government that rests on the working class is a populist
dogma.
By not exposing which class has state power,
they disarm the only other class that can remove
that class from power. By not challenging the sacred rights of property and private profit they obscure the mechanism by which one class
perpetuates its rule over the others. The workers
of Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela know that
peoples or popular power is not the same as
workers power a fact that the lessons of 193137 express perfectly well in Spain.
In using imagery designed to attract people
disenchanted by the left, this populism abandons
the struggle to revitalise, renew and reclaim the
historic legacy of the international working class
struggle for the overthrow of capitalism.
The problem of a populist rather than a class
approach to dealing with the crisis of capitalism
is exposed by Podemoss less than principled ap-

proach to the question of womens liberation.

The 2014 European election manifesto gave
prominence to the issue of abortion, but this has
been deleted from the new manifesto.
Why? Polls show that the majority of
Podemoss support comes from people disenfranchised with the political system, meaning
that its leadership must tailor its programme to a
voting base that is disconnected from the working class struggle for social emancipation. Abandoning the open and uncompromising defence
of womens liberation for base political calculation is a damning indictment of populism as an
obstacle to the struggle for social liberation.

Conclusion
In Britain the Scottish National Partys populist
adoption of old Labour policies and its presentation of the referendum on independence as
a referendum on austerity, alongside the rise of
the Greens in England and Plaid Cymru in Wales
show that an anti-austerity message can win support, even when presented by parties outside of
the labour movement.
But if we abandon the historic language and
symbols of the left then we also abandon the
analysis and the methods of struggle that these
represent. And that means abandoning the most
important struggle of all: the struggle for the
working class to create for itself a political leadership that prosecutes the class struggle in the
most uncompromising way.
We need a party that expresses the ability of
the working class to take political responsibility
for its historic struggle against capitalism.
But as the example of Syriza shows, although
the rise of new anti-austerity parties creates opportunities for the class struggle, their desire to
pursue a capitalist route out of the crisis necessarily assigns a secondary role to the working
class people whose support they rest on.
A breach in the austerity consensus opened
up by these parties opens a small window of opportunity. It is the duty of socialists to warn of
the limits of this breach, and to organise the
most militant workers to take advantage of it,
explaining that these parties' programmes will
ultimately transform them into instruments for
sealing off that same breach that their rise has
opened.
The election of parties, however radical, that
seek to renegotiate the terms on which capitalisms crisis is to be resolved carries great
dangers. A party like Podemos that draws its
support from a cross-class alliance might win
elections, but it cannot maintain this alliance indefinitely.
When faced with intransigence from the capitalist class that exploits not only Greece and
Spain but the whole world, Podemos will have
to choose which class to obey. Iglesias and
company's post-modern sneering at the very
idea of attacking capitalism, and at the old
language of class struggle indicate they have already made that choice. The new Podemos populism is but the old PSOE reformism writ large,
but without even the link to the mass organisations of the working class movement. Workers,
women and youth of Spain, beware.

wp383pp12.qxp_Layout 1 08/04/2015 17:02 Page 1

workers

1 APRIL 1 02 Workers Power

power

workerspower.co.uk @workerspowerL5i contact@workerspower.co.uk

Marxism and elections

A two-part history of how revolutionaries learned to use elections as a weapon against capital

o understand how classical Marxists

developed their tactics towards elections, we need to understand their
analysis of the class nature of the state
and of its political forms and how these effect
the working class struggle for power.
Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, stated the goal of the working class very
generally:
The immediate aim of the Communists is
the same as that of all other proletarian parties:
formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of
political power by the proletariat.And:
the first step in the revolution by the
working class is to raise the proletariat to the
position of ruling class, to win the battle of
democracy.
Winning democracy, as Hal Draper pointed
out in The Adventures of the Communist Manifesto, was no simple matter of winning elections
but the revolutionary conquest of universal suffrage, the abolition of monarchies, aristocracies,
police, military and bureaucratic states. etc.
As for existing parliaments Marx was, however, aware of the need to participate in elections no matter how unlikely they were to win
seats in them:
Even when there is no prospect whatsoever
of their being elected, the workers must put up
their own candidates in order to preserve their
independence, to count their forces, and to bring
before the public their revolutionary attitude
and party standpoint.
At the end of the revolutionary period of
1848-51 and even more so during the Paris
Commune of 1871, Marx developed a more
radical view of seizing power:
"If you look at the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire, you will find that I say that the
next attempt of the French Revolution will be
no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another but to smash it"
Engels in the Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State explained the bureaucratic machine as the inevitable consequence of
a society split into social classes, into exploiters
and exploited:
This special, public power is necessary because a self-acting armed organisation of the
population has become impossible since the
split into classes This public power exists in
every state; it consists not merely of armed men
but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds
Engels in 1875, when he asserted bluntly that
the Paris Commune was no longer a state in
the proper sense of the word because the working class was armed in the National Guard, the
Commune acted both as legislature and executive, and the former state bureaucrats and
church authorities had fled.
What Marx and Engels were discovering
learning from the revolutionary activities of the
Paris workers themselves was that the bourgeois state, the instrument of force that protected capitalist private ownership of the means
of production, had to be demolished in the
course of a revolution, and that elections to a
National Assembly or parliament could never
transfer real power to the exploited.

DAVE STOCKTON

THE PARIS COMMUNE TAUGHT EARLY LESSONS ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE STATE

Moreover in order to enact and enforce a programme of transition from capitalism to a socialist society, a radically different type of
democracy a democracy of recallable delegates, non-permanent officials paid the wage of
an average worker and a people's militia, not a
standing army was required.

The immediate aim of

the Communists is the
same as that of all other
proletarian parties:
formation of the proletariat
into a class, overthrow of
the bourgeois supremacy,
conquest of political
power by the proletariat.
This unparalleled degree of democracy for
the workers and poor farmers would at the same
time have to be a dictatorship over the formerly
ruling and exploiting classes. It would be, as
both Marx and Engels said many times, the dictatorship of the proletariat.
However the great lessons of the Commune
began to fade in the era of the Second International (1889-1914) as universal (male) suffrage
was won in a number of European and North
American states. But, despite the growth of
mass workers' parties, most notably the German
Social Democracy (SPD), rather than becoming
immediately an instrument of class emancipation, parliamentarianism evolved into a means
of spiritual enslavement of the lower middle
class and sections of the working class too.
Later in 1919, in Terrorism and Communism,
Trotsky well described this apparatus of ideological enslavement putting the following
words into the mouth of the bourgeoisie:
While I have in my hands lands, factories,
workshops, banks; while I possess newspapers,
universities, schools; while and this most important of all I retain control of the army: the

apparatus of democracy, however, you reconstruct it, will remain obedient to my will. I subordinate to my interests spiritually the stupid,
conservative, characterless lower middle class,
just as it is subjected to me materially. I oppress,
and will oppress, its imagination by the gigantic
scale of my buildings, my transactions, my
plans, and my crimes.
For moments when it is dissatisfied and
murmurs, I have created scores of safety-valves
and lightning-conductors. At the right moment
I will bring into existence opposition parties,
which will disappear tomorrow, but which
today accomplish their mission by affording the
possibility of the lower middle class expressing
their indignation without hurt therefrom for
capitalism. I shall hold the masses of the people,
under cover of compulsory general education,
on the verge of complete ignorance, giving
them no opportunity of rising above the level
which my experts in spiritual slavery consider
safe.
I will corrupt, deceive, and terrorise the
more privileged or the more backward of the
proletariat itself. By means of these measures I
shall not allow the vanguard of the working
class to gain the ear of the majority of the working class, while the necessary weapons of mastery and terrorism remain in my hands.
In the years that followed the death of Marx
(1883) and Engels (1895) a debate broke out
amongst the followers of the two founders. This
saw Karl Kautsky, the principle theoretician of
the SPD, and Rosa Luxemburg ranged against
Eduard Bernstein, who argued that once universal (male) suffrage had been won, as in Germany, socialism could be achieved on the road
of a peaceful incremental reform, not by a revolution, that would destroy the state.
Bernstein, who lived in Britain for two
decades, came under the influence of the Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and others,
whose slogan was the inevitability of gradualness. They argued that gradual series of reforms, won via parliament, local councils,
cooperative stores and trade union collective
bargaining, would inevitably replace capitalism
with a socialised world.
But for this purpose it was enough to per-

meate existing bourgeois parties with socialist

reforms (municipal housing, libraries, hospitals,
state insurance, old age pensions, etc.). Logically they were at first opposed to the formation
of an independent Labour Party.
These ideas logically led Bernstein to the
view that the final goal (socialism) meant nothing whereas the movement (Social Democracy
and the trade unions) was everything.
Rosa Luxemburg replied to this in her unsurpassed critique of such views, Reform or Revolution:
People who pronounce themselves in favour
of the method of legislative reform in place of
and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution do not really
choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road
to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of
taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modification
of the old society.
In the years 1899-1909 Karl Kautsky was at
the height of his authority as the Pope of Marxism, the champion of orthodoxy against revisionism. Indeed in the period of the 1905
revolution he found himself in close collaboration with Rosa Luxemburg, often supporting
Lenin against the Mensheviks.
But by 1912 he had already begun his retreat,
approaching Bernsteins views. He was now arguing that the proletariat could not set as its
goal the destruction of state power but only a
shift in the relation of forces within state

It is natural for a liberal

to speak of 'democracy' in
general; but a Marxist will
never forget to ask: for
what class?
power.
He continued:
The objective of our political struggle remains what it has always been up to now: the
conquest of state power through the conquest of
a majority in parliament and the elevation of
parliament to a commanding position within the
state. Certainly not the destruction of state
power.
After the catastrophe of the outbreak of the
First World War and the collapse of the Second
International, Lenin re-excavated Marxs views
on the state. Eventually published as State and
Revolution after the Russian revolution, Lenin
revived Marxs emphasis on the necessity of
smashing the state:
The words, to smash the bureaucratic-military machine, briefly express the principal lesson of Marxism regarding the tasks of the
proletariat during a revolution in relation to
state. And it is precisely this lesson that has
been not only completely forgotten, but positively distorted by the prevailing, Kautskyite
'interpretation' of Marxism!
As Lenin wrote It is natural for a liberal to
speak of 'democracy' in general; but a Marxist
will never forget to ask: for what class?
To be continued next month

wp383pp12.qxp_Layout 1 08/04/2015 17:02 Page 1

workers

1 APRIL 1 02 Workers Power

power

workerspower.co.uk @workerspowerL5i contact@workerspower.co.uk

Marxism and elections

A two-part history of how revolutionaries learned to use elections as a weapon against capital

o understand how classical Marxists

developed their tactics towards elections, we need to understand their
analysis of the class nature of the state
and of its political forms and how these effect
the working class struggle for power.
Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, stated the goal of the working class very
generally:
The immediate aim of the Communists is
the same as that of all other proletarian parties:
formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of
political power by the proletariat.And:
the first step in the revolution by the
working class is to raise the proletariat to the
position of ruling class, to win the battle of
democracy.
Winning democracy, as Hal Draper pointed
out in The Adventures of the Communist Manifesto, was no simple matter of winning elections
but the revolutionary conquest of universal suffrage, the abolition of monarchies, aristocracies,
police, military and bureaucratic states. etc.
As for existing parliaments Marx was, however, aware of the need to participate in elections no matter how unlikely they were to win
seats in them:
Even when there is no prospect whatsoever
of their being elected, the workers must put up
their own candidates in order to preserve their
independence, to count their forces, and to bring
before the public their revolutionary attitude
and party standpoint.
At the end of the revolutionary period of
1848-51 and even more so during the Paris
Commune of 1871, Marx developed a more
radical view of seizing power:
"If you look at the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire, you will find that I say that the
next attempt of the French Revolution will be
no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another but to smash it"
Engels in the Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State explained the bureaucratic machine as the inevitable consequence of
a society split into social classes, into exploiters
and exploited:
This special, public power is necessary because a self-acting armed organisation of the
population has become impossible since the
split into classes This public power exists in
every state; it consists not merely of armed men
but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds
Engels in 1875, when he asserted bluntly that
the Paris Commune was no longer a state in
the proper sense of the word because the working class was armed in the National Guard, the
Commune acted both as legislature and executive, and the former state bureaucrats and
church authorities had fled.
What Marx and Engels were discovering
learning from the revolutionary activities of the
Paris workers themselves was that the bourgeois state, the instrument of force that protected capitalist private ownership of the means
of production, had to be demolished in the
course of a revolution, and that elections to a
National Assembly or parliament could never
transfer real power to the exploited.

DAVE STOCKTON

THE PARIS COMMUNE TAUGHT EARLY LESSONS ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE STATE

Moreover in order to enact and enforce a programme of transition from capitalism to a socialist society, a radically different type of
democracy a democracy of recallable delegates, non-permanent officials paid the wage of
an average worker and a people's militia, not a
standing army was required.

The immediate aim of

the Communists is the
same as that of all other
proletarian parties:
formation of the proletariat
into a class, overthrow of
the bourgeois supremacy,
conquest of political
power by the proletariat.
This unparalleled degree of democracy for
the workers and poor farmers would at the same
time have to be a dictatorship over the formerly
ruling and exploiting classes. It would be, as
both Marx and Engels said many times, the dictatorship of the proletariat.
However the great lessons of the Commune
began to fade in the era of the Second International (1889-1914) as universal (male) suffrage
was won in a number of European and North
American states. But, despite the growth of
mass workers' parties, most notably the German
Social Democracy (SPD), rather than becoming
immediately an instrument of class emancipation, parliamentarianism evolved into a means
of spiritual enslavement of the lower middle
class and sections of the working class too.
Later in 1919, in Terrorism and Communism,
Trotsky well described this apparatus of ideological enslavement putting the following
words into the mouth of the bourgeoisie:
While I have in my hands lands, factories,
workshops, banks; while I possess newspapers,
universities, schools; while and this most important of all I retain control of the army: the

apparatus of democracy, however, you reconstruct it, will remain obedient to my will. I subordinate to my interests spiritually the stupid,
conservative, characterless lower middle class,
just as it is subjected to me materially. I oppress,
and will oppress, its imagination by the gigantic
scale of my buildings, my transactions, my
plans, and my crimes.
For moments when it is dissatisfied and
murmurs, I have created scores of safety-valves
and lightning-conductors. At the right moment
I will bring into existence opposition parties,
which will disappear tomorrow, but which
today accomplish their mission by affording the
possibility of the lower middle class expressing
their indignation without hurt therefrom for
capitalism. I shall hold the masses of the people,
under cover of compulsory general education,
on the verge of complete ignorance, giving
them no opportunity of rising above the level
which my experts in spiritual slavery consider
safe.
I will corrupt, deceive, and terrorise the
more privileged or the more backward of the
proletariat itself. By means of these measures I
shall not allow the vanguard of the working
class to gain the ear of the majority of the working class, while the necessary weapons of mastery and terrorism remain in my hands.
In the years that followed the death of Marx
(1883) and Engels (1895) a debate broke out
amongst the followers of the two founders. This
saw Karl Kautsky, the principle theoretician of
the SPD, and Rosa Luxemburg ranged against
Eduard Bernstein, who argued that once universal (male) suffrage had been won, as in Germany, socialism could be achieved on the road
of a peaceful incremental reform, not by a revolution, that would destroy the state.
Bernstein, who lived in Britain for two
decades, came under the influence of the Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and others,
whose slogan was the inevitability of gradualness. They argued that gradual series of reforms, won via parliament, local councils,
cooperative stores and trade union collective
bargaining, would inevitably replace capitalism
with a socialised world.
But for this purpose it was enough to per-

meate existing bourgeois parties with socialist

reforms (municipal housing, libraries, hospitals,
state insurance, old age pensions, etc.). Logically they were at first opposed to the formation
of an independent Labour Party.
These ideas logically led Bernstein to the
view that the final goal (socialism) meant nothing whereas the movement (Social Democracy
and the trade unions) was everything.
Rosa Luxemburg replied to this in her unsurpassed critique of such views, Reform or Revolution:
People who pronounce themselves in favour
of the method of legislative reform in place of
and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution do not really
choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road
to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of
taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modification
of the old society.
In the years 1899-1909 Karl Kautsky was at
the height of his authority as the Pope of Marxism, the champion of orthodoxy against revisionism. Indeed in the period of the 1905
revolution he found himself in close collaboration with Rosa Luxemburg, often supporting
Lenin against the Mensheviks.
But by 1912 he had already begun his retreat,
approaching Bernsteins views. He was now arguing that the proletariat could not set as its
goal the destruction of state power but only a
shift in the relation of forces within state

It is natural for a liberal

to speak of 'democracy' in
general; but a Marxist will
never forget to ask: for
what class?
power.
He continued:
The objective of our political struggle remains what it has always been up to now: the
conquest of state power through the conquest of
a majority in parliament and the elevation of
parliament to a commanding position within the
state. Certainly not the destruction of state
power.
After the catastrophe of the outbreak of the
First World War and the collapse of the Second
International, Lenin re-excavated Marxs views
on the state. Eventually published as State and
Revolution after the Russian revolution, Lenin
revived Marxs emphasis on the necessity of
smashing the state:
The words, to smash the bureaucratic-military machine, briefly express the principal lesson of Marxism regarding the tasks of the
proletariat during a revolution in relation to
state. And it is precisely this lesson that has
been not only completely forgotten, but positively distorted by the prevailing, Kautskyite
'interpretation' of Marxism!
As Lenin wrote It is natural for a liberal to
speak of 'democracy' in general; but a Marxist
will never forget to ask: for what class?
To be continued next month